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The unions charge against the ruling, since one of the reasons for the complaint is the employment of false self-employed, among whom union elections cannot be held
blow of the National audience a UGT Y CCOO, which has dismissed his claim against UberEats after disconnecting this en masse a few 3,000 autonomous distributors on the eve of the entry into force of the ‘law rider‘. The magistrates of the court consider that the plants “lack implantation” in the sector of home delivery applications and, specifically, among UberEats workers to challenge what they considered an illegal collective dismissal, as indicated in the sentence to which EL PERIODICO has had access.
CCOO and UGT charge against the ruling, pointing out that among self-employed workers -a substantial part of their demand- it is not possible to hold union elections and that this requires the prior employment of the templates, precisely what they are denouncing. And they consider that it opens the door to an unfavorable precedent for the interests of the workers, because in sectors where there is a massive use of false self-employed it will not be possible to file complaints from the majority unions until said sectors have not previously been employed.
The signature of the green backpacks disconnected the past August 12, 2021 in a generalized way to all the self-employed couriers who provided services through their application. Well, that same day the new ‘rider law’ came into force, which specifically establishes that platform application distributors must be hired as employees by companies in the sector. Given this regulation, UberEats stopped using self-employed workers for distribution and began to employ them through subcontractors. And the same day it came into force, it vetoed access to its application from any freelancer.
This decision was interpreted by the unions as an illegal collective dismissal, since they consider that the company should have employed these delivery men and then, if it preferred to articulate its delivery fleet through subcontractors, fire them with their relevant compensation. And it is that the centrals point out that with this massive disconnection UberEats got rid of recognizing the employment relationship that the delivery men had had with it until now and assuming the consequent costs. Unlike Deliveroo, which in order to stop operating in Spain first hired its fleet of 3,800 delivery men and then made an ere to fire them.
They are not “abstract guardians of legality”
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To resolve this conflict, UGT and CCOO raised the case to the National High Court, which has knocked down the case. The magistrates accept the company’s arguments and consider that the unions are not “abstract guardians of legality” and that in order to appear in the case they should have a direct presence in the sector and the company, beyond their status as ‘most representative ‘ for its weight in affiliates in the Spanish economy as a whole. To do so, it relies on a couple of previous rulings by the Supreme Court, one referring to a conflict in a college Madrid and another referring to a union of reduced affiliation in Cádiz. Both, however, start from companies with employees, not from self-employed fleets, as in the current case. “It is its degree of implementation that must act as a determining element of the link with the object of the process,” reads one of the sentences cited by the National Court.
“Any union is not entitled to challenge a collective dismissal” and the legitimacy is “only of the unions with implantation in the area of the conflict”, assert the magistrates. A paradox, according to the centrals, since one of the keys to their complaint is the supposed condition of false self-employment of the delivery men, which, among other things, deprives them of the right to union organization and to hold elections for delegates and committee of business. The usual mechanisms in any company to measure the implementation and representativeness of any union.
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